Rhett Butler Plea
by Merovia
Summary: Rhett Butler has a plea. Read to find out what. Just a one shot!


**A/N - This is just a one shot that came to me out of the blue. **

Dear All Fanfictioneers

This is me sending you a sincere plea. This is me begging for peace. This is me asking you to stop.

Just stop! Breathe deeply and stop!

Let your ever scratching pens hang still and the restless fingers digging out new sheets of paper get some rest.

I can't take it anymore.

I need my rest, not forever chasing around on some wild goose chase that you think up. While I admire your effort, I will let you know that your efforts are futile. I meant what I said. I meant what I said that night. My love is dead. Hell my soul is dead too. None of which can be revived.

I don't want them to be.

To stress the point: I need some peace and quiet. I need some time to rest. I need to heal. None of which can be done whilst you keep on subjecting me to new adventures.

Once, years ago I would have enjoyed it, but it is a time long past.

Therefore I repeat my plea. Stop, stop it all.

I have found the place I need to be, the place where I can get the help I need.

Ahh...!!!

I see this will not be an easy battle to win. Like her. Like the South in general you are stubborn and will not take my words at face value.

Then do me just one favour. Listen carefully to what I am about to tell you.

My marriage, our marriage, never did stand a chance for success. Too many things were wrong when we entered into it. I know why your hope burns so strongly for us; I have seen the gilded version presented to you. If that was the truth, I might still have faith, I might believe as well. But I who have lived through all these events know that the truth as it has been presented to the world is naught but a sham. The actual actions were darker and filled with greater sorrow than you can ever imagine. Those Scars run too deep for me to see a way to heal them completely, or even enough to ignore them. Habituation to those kind of scars is not possible.

My only hope now is to help those that can still be helped. Her children – our children as I call them now – they have scars as well. But I hope, and am beginning to believe that their scars can heal. That they will be given a chance for happiness.

When first the original author came asking for details of our lives I still believed that published version of the truth to be the whole truth. And I see that She still clung tightly to her beliefs as well, a fact which have changed since as well. I was, and I believe she was as well, still dependent, still ensnared by the easy relief provided by amber liquids.

Well back to my story, the story as I see it now, after finally letting go of that vice which blinded me to so many aspects of life.

I am not brave and heroic as you all seem to think. I am not mysterious. I am quite simply a drunk. Yes. I can already hear you thinking up excuse and disbelief is ringing from you pens.

But it is the truth. I am a drunk.

A drunk, who has now managed to slave his way into sobriety. Not that I particularly enjoy the take on my life a sober eye give, but I've done it for them.

And that is my main reason for asking you to stop. I cannot bear all the reminders of the could have been that continuously spawn from your pens. They make the urge to dive back in to oblivion too inviting.

Well back to the story of my life, of our lives.

Except for a very few occasions I have spent the last many years of my life more or less intoxicated.

The stone cold façade you all seem to admire is wrought, not from an intense self control, but merely from a numbness brought on by the copious amounts of alcohol and other substances that has been my most liable friend over the years.

I've been through hell and back more times that anyone should have to endure. That is my excuse. Somewhere along the way I lost my sense of footing and became too dependent on the relief that can be gained from nose diving into a bottle of single malt.

At first it calms the senses, gives you just that little bit of a steady hand that you need when you are hanging on for dear life with just the edge of your teeth.

Once you feel the help that can be gained in those extremes situations it is easy to be seduced into using that steady hand in other situations as well. Suddenly you feel like you cannot cope with even the simplest task without a fortifier of some sort. Not only alcohol but other things as well.

When you travel as much as I have, you are bound to learn a thing or two about the various substances that are used for mental relief around the globe.

You all thought I had a special fondness for cigars didn't you. Well, I promise you that they were all of my own very special brand. My dear Belle was always there. She was the only one who really knew. She provided me with all I needed and as a consequence I bought her silence. Yes, that fancy place of hers was bought with my guilt money. My bribe to keep her silent.

Life is a strange thing when it is controlled by chemistry. Hell, Love even is a strange thing when your life is controlled by chemistry.

I really did Love her. You see how I capitalised the word Love?

For a while she lessened my need for dulling my pain, my memories, my feelings with alcohol. She gave me courage and a will to feel it all again. But somehow it didn't last, and in the end I dragged her, albeit unknowingly, dragged her into the same abuse. For that I am ashamed.

Perhaps if I ad been able to clean up I could have made her love me. I see now that she sometimes questioned if she did, but then I would go back to my intoxicated state and treat her boorishly. Shattering those small sprigs of emotions that were blossoming in her heart.

Everytime I left town and the semi soberness I had managed to stick to whilst there, I would go on a binge. Drink myself into a stupor, drown out all thoughts of her. It was my only way to survive. I needed her badly then, saw her as my olive branch. She was like me, yet untarnished by faith. I believde she could be my saviour, yet every small rejection she gave me would eventually accumulate until the breaking point. And I would have to leave in order to get some air.

You still don't believe... well here is another.

Take my proposal for example. That evening I was so completely out of my head that I barely remember it taking place. Who else than an intoxicated fool would flick so rapidly between various emotions?

And the marriage itself?

Scarlett, I am sure had never realised the extent of my problems before she married me. I am not even sure she realised it until after Bonnie… when I finally lost all pretence of a sober façade. But it had been my constant companion all the way through.

Drunken love in the streets of New Orleans, spoiling her with all she wanted. I lavished her with anything she wanted. I was generous. Those days where like the first tipsiness you feel when the bubbles of an uncorked champagne enters your brain. A tinkling sensation of happiness.

Later I turned mean. A mean drunk. I would often witness myself through the fogs of alcohol and intoxicating leaves. See words that I didn't mean, didn't intend to say slip from my tongue and land as poisonous darts in her heart. Turning my inadequateness as a husband into jealousy of her presumed love for Ashley. I drove her to him; with every drunken insult I drove her to him.

When she discovered she couldn't find the support she needed in him either she desperately sought out a different kind of support. In the end it drove her too seek the same comfort I had sought out so many years ago. I had seen the latency in her already during her years with that Kennedy bastard, but I chose to ignore it. Convinced myself that it wouldn't be a problem. It was back then, when I still thought that I could fight it as long as I had her by my side. I actually convinced myself, that since I knew what a fickle friend alcohol is, and what fickle relief you find when numbing your senses, I would be better suited to help her.

So there we were to lonely people drifting further and further apart on each of our drunken islands.

Perhaps we could have existed like that for ever, but then she died. Our precious girl died. At first it drove me further into the abuse. As I stated above. It was then that I gave up all pretence of control. I was constantly drunk. Never even enjoying a few seconds respite from the numbness provided. More and more was needed to keep the feelings at bay. Until one day I couldn't take it anymore. It was the lost look in her children's eyes that finally broke through my shell. Their eyes silently begging for a different life. That broke my shell and I realised, that I had to stop.

It was around the same time that Melanie died.

An unfortunate coincidence, I am sure that my actions then seemed crude to most. How could I leave her when she needed me the most?

It was a harsh thing to do I know. But you have to understand that my brains, even after a couple of days, perhaps weeks, of being sober, was still very much under the influence of the poison I had literally been swimming in for the last decade. And especially the vast consummations in the months prior to that, after Bonnie's departure.

Bonnie. Do I have to state that I take full blame for all that happened to her? I am sometimes surprised that it didn't happen earlier.

I shall not tire you with all the details of our lives together. I hope you get the picture I am trying to paint.

But I am diverting myself from my tale again. I was leaving her, had finally made my decision. I was sober, or at least something resembling sober. I couldn't go back on that decision. Knowing full well that if I gave into her, I would revert to my ways, the habit was too ingrained. I was barely strong enough to keep myself from using. How could I have been strong enough to fight her battle as well?

The part of me that still cared for her, ached for her that night, even as I spoke of Love in terms of dollars and dimes. The only term she would ever really understand. No matter how intoxicated Scarlett was, she always had a clear head for numbers.

Deep down I felt that she would have a better chance of making it on her own. Would I have sacrificed myself had I still believed I was the one to help her? I don't know. Sincerely I don't think so. I have never disguised the fact that I am selfish. A selfish man.

But my request to you is not selfish. Or at least I tell myself it isn't. Not completely. It is for her children. Our children I need to keep my sanity.

So again.

Please all of you out there who takes such keen interest in our lives. Know this. It was all a sham. A sorry drunken mess, of which no good could ever have come. So stop. Please let go of your urge to get us back together. You are trying to fix something that never could be fixed.

Something that was already irreparable and broken, with the pieces spread by the seven winds, even before we tried to put it together.

These are my final words to you. My most sincere plea.

Stop.

Put away all thoughts

Put away all those irresistible ideas.

Put away the need to formulate your wishes and hopes for us.

Just accept that it wasn't meant to be.

Just accept that nothing good can come of presenting gilded what ifs.

Just accept that history can not be reversed or changed.

Just stop.

Yours sincerely

Rhett Butler


End file.
